Various Artists

The DFA Remixes: Chapter One

The DFA collect mostly early 00s remixes for Le Tigre, Metro Area, and Fischerspooner, highlighting the duo's understanding of disco as a space of infinite possibility.

Electro-house remixer Ewan Pearson likes to talk about reviving the 1980s "extended mix," using dance music's arsenal of sonic tricks to inflate songs from the inside, ballooning them into decadent anthems whose radical but respectful relationship to the original can evade the tricky song-versus-track binary, and instead play around with both notions. The "song" remains as a corporeal latticework, holding everything together with personable charisma, while the "track" elements (riffs, beats, noisy eruptions) are marshalled into elaborately staged configurations, sometimes mimicking verse-chorus structures, and sometimes lavishly unveiled in epic movements that would make Pink Floyd proud.

Pearson's notion is typical of a generalized will-to-overproduction that motivates many of the best artists in contemporary dance music, from Dominik Eulberg to Jacques Lu Cont, to offer their most interesting work as remixes for other artists. The DFA would probably sympathise as well: At their expansive best, the DFA's remixes can resemble gleaming, lavishly detailed architectural structures. It is here, rather than on artist projects such as LCD Soundsystem, that you can hear most clearly James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy's understanding of disco as a space of infinite possibility, the 4/4 beat providing a continuum around which all manner of grandiose visions can be assembled and demolished.

The word "disco" must be emphasised: Whatever else Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy might throw on top, it's that endless throb that forms the core of the the duo's work. Owing to their label's benefaction of rock and noise acts, it's tempting to claim that the DFA have summoned up some sort of utopian, pan-genre "One Nation Under a Groove" vibe in which passing resemblances to Tago Mago or Remain in Light signal rock's discovery of a way to make dance music that's not, y'know Dance Music. But the DFA's rock credentials are just that, granting them a context and an audience that allows their engagement with dance's mind-altering flights of fancy to appear more exciting and unprecedented than they otherwise might. An illusion, then, but a viscerally effective one.

It helps the duo's rock cred that their drums usually sound like they've been recorded live in a chicken coop using a Dictaphone, but listen to the assembled remixes on this compilation in chronological order, and it becomes clear that the DFA have all along been engaged in a flight from rock. Sure, their version of Radio 4's "Dance to the Underground" might be the archetypal "disco-punk" track, smothering the sharp, jolting restlessness of the original with deep disco bass, eerie keyboards, and dub echo. But it's the act of smothering itself that is important, not the sharpness of what is smothered: Early remix efforts for Le Tigre, Fischerspooner, and Metro Area all come out blearier and hazier (not to mention better) than the originals, their wonky live feel evocative not of punk energy but the thrilling anxiety that at any moment the groove might fall apart, as if the possibility of making mistakes is covalent with the possibility of making magic. It's not disco-punk but disco-hippy, and with each new effort the team's pretence at starsailing becomes more pronounced.

Which is not to say that these astral navigators don't have a formula. In fact, some have complained that hearing these remixes back-to-back makes their formula a bit too pointedly clear; for example, remixes of Jon Spencer Blues Explosion's "Mars, Arizona" and Gorillaz's "Dare" share the exact same disco-rock to noisy freak out trajectory (of the two, "Mars, Arizona" wins out simply for compressing the trajectory more ruthlessly). But a formula ain't necessarily a bad thing: Think of it as a carefully considered training technique, designed to flex and strengthen certain sonic muscles in aid of achieving ever more impressive results.

The duo's remix of Goldfrap's "Slide In" (reserved for the sequel to this volume) is the formula's pinnacle, as well as their most unashamedly psychedelic effort to date, moving seamlessly from blocky live disco to a shamanist wipe-out somewhere between Can and Orbital. Ewan Pearson claims that it inspired him to make his own 15-minute, two-part "Disco Odyssey" remix for Goldfrapp, and it's fitting that in this environment of sonic cross-pollination and oneupmanship, the DFA return the favour on their Pearsonesque remix of the Chemical Brothers' "The Boxer", a synth-laden Balearic house number that shimmers with unabashed gorgeousness. Alongside the stark, eerie techno balladry of their remix of Hot Chip's "Just Like We (Breakdown)" it's this compilation's most starry-eyed and astonishing moment. All of which suggests that the DFA's finest and furthest-out work may lie yet further inside dance music's sticky and intimate embrace.